Review: In "Titus Andronicus," Revenge Is a Dish Best Served as a Pie

Titus Andronicus

Written by William Shakespeare

Directed by Jesse Berger

Presented by Red Bull Theater at The Pershing Square Signature Center’s Alice Griffin Jewel Box Theatre

480 West 42nd Street, Manhattan, NYC

March 18-April 19, 2026

Anthony Michael Lopez, Anthony Michael Martinez, Patrick Page, Zack Lopez Roa. Photo credit: Carol Rosegg.

William Shakespeare's early-career revenge tragedy Titus Andronicus (George Peele is a popular candidate for the argument that parts of the play were written by a second playwright) drops the audience immediately into the midst of a dispute over who will succeed the deceased Emperor of Rome, his eldest son, Saturninus (Matthew Amendt), or younger brother Bassianus (Howard W. Overshown). The opening stage direction specifies that the two brothers and their followers enter at opposite doors, while Tribune Marcus, shortly to provide a third option–the titular Titus, the people's choice–enters with others "aloft," creating a visual shorthand for the factional dynamics at play. In the superb new production of Titus Andronicus from Red Bull Theater, that spatial arrangement is inverted, bringing the tribune down onto the stage while positioning Saturninus and Bassianus on facing balconies, drawing the audience more directly into the back and forth between the royal siblings. A second, more substantial change in this scene is that Titus's brother Marcus is now Titus's sister Marcia (Enid Graham), an alteration that intriguingly complicates the play's binary pair of female characters: bad, lascivious Goth mother Tamora (Francesca Faridany) and good, chaste Roman daughter Lavinia (Olivia Reis). That change also puts a different inflection on the discovery, now by a female rather than male relative, of Lavinia after she has been assaulted.

Jesse Aaronson, Amy Jo Jackson, Adam Langdon, McKinley Belcher III, Francesca Faridany. Photo credit: Carol Rosegg.

Before the lights come up on the abovementioned opening scene, the audience hears sounds of a clash in the darkness that bring to mind not only the Roman wars against the Goths from which Titus is returning but also the confrontation between the supporters of the contenders for the throne. (Foreign and domestic here, like personal and political and even sanity and madness, is far from a hard and fast distinction in this play.) As a general, Titus brings with him victory, several slain sons, several surviving ones (Lucius [Anthony Michael Lopez], Quintus [Zack Lopez Roa], and Mutius [Anthony Michael Martinez] and a handful of prisoners: Tamora, Queen of the Goths; her sons Alarbus (Blair Baker), Chiron (Jesse Aaronson), and Demetrius (Adam Langdon); and Aaron (McKinley Belcher III), a Moor and, as he reveals in a soliloquy when he first speaks, Tamora's lover. Titus refuses the office of Emperor for himself, citing his age, and, being a follower of rules and precedent, throws his support behind the elder–and clearly less suitable–son, a choice that he and his family will come to regret. Between Titus's insistence on sacrificing Alarbus and Saturninus's unexpected and soon reversed choice to wed Lavinia, already betrothed to Bassianus, lines of conflict quickly emerge. Saturninus weds Tamora instead, elevating and empowering Rome's enemies, who waste little time committing a series of offences against the Andronici that will eventually force Titus to abandon his fealty to Rome in favor of cleaving to his own and his remaining family's revenge.

Patrick Page, Zack Lopez Roa, Anthony Michael Martinez, Howard W. Overshown, Enid Graham. Photo credit: Carol Rosegg.

Red Bull's Titus establishes a fluid momentum right from the opening scene that carries right through the expertly choreographed chaos of its climactic confrontation. Some nips and tucks to the playtext play a role along the way: Martius, one of Titus's surviving sons, is cut, and Mutius has a better time of things, for a while anyway, removing a potential obstacle to sympathizing with Titus. Additionally, Lucius's young son, Lucius (a role expanded into a kind of point-of-view character in Julie Taymor's film 1999 film adaptation), is cleanly excised, a change that assists in the way that the closing moments of this production throw the focus onto the audience by removing one potential avatar of Roman futurity. Rome itself is represented, in a set designed by Beowulf Boritt, by an abundance of smooth, soaring columns and shades of gray, the lighter of which nicely set off the blood that is drooled, dripped, spattered, and otherwise spilled on the stage. The lighting, designed by Jiyoun Chang, sometimes bathes that stage in bright whites, at other times, such as Saturninus's nuptial celebration (a scene throughout which Aaron stands significantly apart and alone in the rear), brightens it with a cheerful mix of colors, or, when things get violent in yet another scene, saturates it all in oppressive red. Fantastic use of the trapdoor typical of early modern stages is made when Chiron and Demetrius make good on the former's lines about making a certain corpse pillow to their lust in a way that takes chilling advantage of the maxim that what one imagines is worse than what one sees. Of course, the audience also does see plenty: a certain pie, for instance, is constructed to appear deliciously off-putting.

Back L to R: Anthony Michael Martinez, Zack Lopez Roa, Howard W. Overshown, Blair Baker, Front L to R: Enid Graham, Anthony Michael Lopez, Matthew Amendt, Patrick Page, and Francesca Faridany. Photo credit: Carol Rosegg.

When the performances are as accomplished as they are in Red Bull's production, from Faridany's towering turn as Tamora to Amy Jo Jackson's assured appearance as the ill-fated nurse, small choices stand out. Early on, Page as Titus doesn't even pause to think when Tamora pleads with him to spare her first-born son from sacrifice. The unexpected laughter that marks his mid-play pivot away from loyalty to Rome and towards personal revenge against its leadership feels like it is choking him as it works its way out. His subsequent punning references to hands comes across as a tender attempt to connect with and comfort Lavinia, and, when Lavinia points him to a sentence in Ovid that reveals what Tamora's sons did to her, Page communicates so much in the extended pause after Titus has read the word for what happened and before he can utter it aloud. Late in the play, Reis's Lavinia laughs when holding the bowl meant to receive enemies' blood, and even later, despite being unable to speak, tries to say something to other of those enemies in her final moments: little moments that have a big humanizing effect, not unlike how Aaronson and Langdon render apparent the usually boisterous Chiron's and Demetrius's fear of Aaron after he commits a particular act of violence (in the only scene incidentally, in which Belcher can and does show true tenderness from Aaron), or how Amendt's volatile tyrant boops another character on the nose. His Saturninus delivers his own weighty pause when he sees that Titus has addressed one of a number of arrows fired into the court to the god of…war. And to take an example from the lighter side, Overshown as Publius Andronicus responds to Chiron's and Demetrius's disguises with perfect comic timing and pitch for one of the funniest moments in the production.

Adam Langdon, Amy Jo Jackson, Jesse Aaronson. Photo credit: Carol Rosegg.

The costumes for these characters, designed by Emily Rebholz, not only look great but also consistently enrich our understanding of character and context. The bright red gloves worn with the Romans' black uniforms not only suggest blood but also underscore the play's insistent return to hands, as symbols, including of service to the empire, and, more literally, as vehicles and victims of violence. Chiron and Demetrius, once out of the prison jumpsuits in which we first see the various Goths, appear like low-level mobsters or, later, lads (in the English slang sense). As the wrongs against Titus accumulate, his military uniform is replaced first by domestic, civilian clothes, then later by a sort of Patton-esque burlesque of a general in one scene, a pants and leather apron ensemble that puts one in mind of Hostel in another, and, of course, his chef whites in the climactic dinner scene. The rest of the central characters in that scene are wearing black, pointing to the evaporation of difference between the supposedly civilized Romans and savage Goths, much in the way that the fact that the Goths speak in English accents and the Romans in American accents hints at a similarity-in-difference between the Goths and Romans.

McKinley Belcher III, Francesca Faridany. Photo credit: Carol Rosegg.

It was common in early modern English drama to displace domestic sociopolitical critique into a setting such as Italy (ensuring plausible deniability should the authorities take offense), and in a time when ancient Rome serves as a fetish of right-wing/manosphere/tech bro types and the U.S. government is busy enacting a return to imperialist foreign policy (if policy isn't far too generous a word), it's hard not to read this Titus's story of an unstable and easily manipulated authoritarian supported (initially) by an unquestioning general (who also buys fully into his society's patriarchal obsession with female sexual purity) through the lens of the contemporary United States. It is no accident that the last words in Red Bull's outstanding production, delivered by Marcia to the audience, exhort the Romans to look at what has been happening and to speak.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards